Who's a better hero? king arthur or beowulf? FILIPINO HERE?

Question

who's a better hero? king arthur or beowulf? give any criteria on which who's better and explain. i need this for my essay. thanks! :)

Answer 1

This an unanswerable question.

Which account of King Arthur?

In some accounts Arthur is very heroic. In other accounts he isn’t, though one can always imagine he has been very heroic just before the story started and is going to be heroeic again after the story ends, if one wishes. Arthur's standard role in the French verse Arthurian romances is that of a “roi fainéant” a “do-nothing king”, something like Hrothgar in the English “Bewolf” tale, whose job in the story is to be in some trouble which a knight, who is the real hero of the tale, gets him out of.

If the heroic knight is to be compared to James Bond, then Arthur can be compared to “M” or Hrothgar.

On the other hand, there are tales in which Arthur is at the centre of the story, such as in Geoffrery of Monmouth’s “Historia Regem Britanniae” and works which follow it. Here Arthur is the heroic victor over the Saxons, the man who in single-combat defeated King Frollo of Gaul and won the crown of Gaul, the heroic slayer of the giants Rion and the giant of Mount Michael, and the general who defeated the Roman army.

Note also that a king usually isn’t allowed to be as heroic as a hero untramelled with responsibility. If Arthur, as a king, were to go out on adventures it would reflect as badly on his court as it would if M were to go on missions like James Bond, or Winston Churchill were to charge up the beaches of Normandy. We are told nothing heroic about Beowulf during the time he is king, except his last battle with the dragon. And indeed, Beowulf really shouldn’t be fighting the dragon, rather some young hero should take on such a task.

Note that at the time that Beowulf is fighting Grendel at Hrothgar's court, we are told that Hrothgar was not sole king, but had as a junior co-king his nephew Hrothwulf son of Helga. In fact Hrothwulf is known under the name Hrolf in Icelandic and Danish accounts as the King Arthur of Denmark.

A translation giving the most complete version of his story is available from Penguin. See http://www.viking.ucla.edu/hrolf/ and http://books.google.ca/books?id=zx_O_WNH... . A short version of the story appears in the second half of chapter 2 of Saxo Grammaticus’ “Gesta Danorum” and in the account of the youth of Hrolf’s father and uncle as here ascribed to a certain Harald and Halfdan whose story is told at the beginning of book VII, see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Danish... and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Danish... .

Many scholars think that Beowulf who fought Grendel during the early years of Hrothwulf’’s reign according to the Old English Beowulf is identical in origin to Boðvar Bjarki of the later stories of Hrolf.

Answer 2

King Arthur and his Roundtable of knights were heroes.

Beowulf was more of an adventurer.